Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections

by Mollie Ziegler Hemingway

Election lawyers will tell you that fraud is almost impossible to conclusively find after the fact, and that to fight it, strong rules and regulations are needed on the front end.

What happened during the 2020 election must be investigated and discussed, not in spite of media and political opposition to an open inquiry, but because of that opposition. The American people deserve to know what happened. They deserve answers, even if those answers are inconvenient. They deserve to know the effect flooding the system with tens of millions of mail-in ballots had on their vote. They deserve to know how and why Big Tech and the corporate political media manipulated the news to support certain political narratives while censoring stories they now admit were true. They deserve to know why courts were allowed to unilaterally rewrite the rules in the middle of the contest, often without the consent of the legislative bodies charged with writing election laws.

Republicans began to issue warnings about the new practices well before November 2020. They talked about how widespread changes in the manner the country conducts elections would create uncertainty, confusion, and delays.

They worried that widespread mail-in voting would lead to fraud. And they had good reason to worry. A 2005 bipartisan commission co-chaired by none other than Jimmy Carter found that absentee balloting was the largest source of potential fraud in American elections. Why should 2020 be any different? They worried that universal mail-in balloting would make ballots harder to track, as some states bombarded addresses with ballots for previous r...

They worried that lowering, or in some cases eliminating, standards for signature verification on mail-in ballots could make it impossible to challenge those fraudulently cast. In an election that promised to be contentious, lowering the standards seemed like a recipe for undermining public faith in...

They worried third-party ballot harvesting would encourage voter fraud. Some states had called for unsupervised drop boxes to replace or supplement ordinary polling stations. What would stop those boxes from being tampered with, or, wors...

They worried ballot management in some areas was privately funded by corporate oligarchs overtly hostile to the Republican Party. Didn’t that give at least the appearance of impropriety? And they worried that failing to remove the deceased and those who moved out of state from voter rolls would cause worse...

Republicans also screamed bloody murder about the censorship by social media platforms of conservative voices and negative news stories about Democrats. They were horrified by a media complex that moved from extreme partisan bias to unabashed propaganda in defense of the Democratic Party. They watched as a completely legitimate story about international corruption involving the Biden family busi...

As mail-in ballots came in and were accepted even when they were not properly filled out, Republicans saw the consequences of the mad rush to change the nation’s voting laws. And they saw how the media dismissed all concerns about how the election was run without a lick of investigation.

The powers that be did whatever it took to prevent Trump from winning his re-election bid in 2020. They admitted as much in a victory lap masquerading as a news article in Time magazine that referred to the individuals and institutions behind the efforts to oust Trump as a “well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”16

However, Trump’s flaws must be weighed against the disturbing nature of the opposition arrayed against him—an army of corporate-funded left-wing activists who excused and encouraged violent riots across the country; technology oligarchs who made unprecedented efforts to normalize censorship; state and local officials who radically altered the way Americans vote in the middle of an election for partisan advantage; an ostensibly free press that credulously and willfully published fake news to damage the president; politicized federal law enforcement agencies that abused the federal government’s surveillance and investigative powers to smear Trump as a puppet of a foreign power; and an opposition party that coordinated all these smears and spent years trying to impeach and remove a duly elected president from office.

America’s smug political elites, of course, responded by mocking a small group of Americans that believe in darker and crazier conspiracies about what happened. It’s convenient to pretend that certain extreme beliefs are representative of all seventy-four million Trump voters, or even of just the tens of millions of Republican voters who are troubled about how the election was conducted.

Those in control of America’s most powerful institutions—business, media, academia, bureaucracies, and even the FBI—are engaged in a permanent struggle against half the country to bring about radical social and political changes.

If you believe things went terribly wrong in the 2020 election, well, you’re not crazy, and you’re not alone. But most of all, you’re not wrong.

abject hatred of Trump was the main—and perhaps the only—unifying issue in the Democratic Party.

Democratic operatives worked with bureaucrats inside the government to convince Americans that Trump hadn’t won fairly, but by colluding with Russia to steal the election.

Over ten thousand protests erupted around the country, at least a thousand of which resulted in violent incidents or riots.9 Dozens of people were killed and billions of dollars of damages were reported.10 Thousands of businesses were lost to fires and looting.

The media and their activist allies pushed the narrative that America was and is an irredeemably racist country and that the George Floyd video was just the latest proof of that reality.

But by 2020, the practice of Americans’ voting on the same day was a thing of the past, and Americans returned to what had been rejected in the 1840s—a lengthy window of time for elections.

In 2016, absentee and mail-in ballots accounted for roughly 33 million of the 140 million ballots counted.20 In 2020, more than 100 million of the 159 million ballots counted were cast prior to Election Day, including by early voting.21

The change was enough for former attorney general William Barr to sound the alarm about how widespread early, absentee, and mail-in voting was negatively affecting the voting public.22 Extending voting well beyond voting day “is like telling a jury in a 2-month trial that they can vote any time they want during the trial,” Barr said after the election in an interview at his home. “You can’t say it’s really a national consensus because people are all operating on a different set of facts.”

Extending voting well beyond voting day “is like telling a jury in a 2-month trial that they can vote any time they want during the trial,” Barr said afte...

With the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, restricting voting rights on the basis of race was unconstitutional. Initially, there was an encouraging number of black Americans being elected to public office. However, southern states soon enacted Jim Crow laws, and black voters consequently faced repugnant measures such as poll taxes, literacy tests, and outright intimidation when they tried to vote. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 finally killed off Jim Crow laws, but earlier anti-corruption reforms such as the removal of partisan interests from controlling the voting process also helped rectify these racial injustices. There was a period after secret ballots were introduced where some questioned whether they were fair because they necessitated reading and writing at a time when much of the black population was illiterate, having been denied an education. However, reformers argued that the introduction of the secret ballot would prevent black voters from being publicly intimidated,33 and they were almost certainly right about that in the long term.

The move to early and mail-in voting took away some of that secrecy, along with the ability to detect fraud or coercion. Deviations from in-person, Election Day voting are supposed to replicate the security and anti-fraud protocols a city or state has for in-person voting on Election Day. Early voting ideally follows a similar procedure to Election Day voting: an individual goes to a public place to identify himself, has his name checked off the voter roll, receives a ballot that he fills out in secret, and casts the ballot into a locked box that will be counted on Election Day.

Early voting hinges on public trust in the election officials who take custody of ballots. Voters must trust that election officials aren’t playing games with ballots in the weeks before Election Day, or otherwise letting ballots be tampered with.

Here, obviously, there are many deviations from the secret ballot system, and many opportunities for fraud. Prior to the 2020 election, the media and other partisans admitted that fact freely.

As damaging as the dossier and larger Russia collusion hoax were to foreign relations, national security, and domestic tranquility, Elias’s real passion had long been helping Democrats win elections by changing voting laws.

And yet, when President Trump said in 2018 that “really bad things” were going on in Broward, which he said “had a horrible history,” and that “they are finding votes out of nowhere,” the Orlando Sentinel said Trump “continued to weave in multiple conspiracy theories” about election fraud.73

He publicly announced a four-pronged push to dramatically expand no-excuse mail-in balloting.79 Postage must be free or prepaid by the government. Ballots that arrived well after Election Day must be counted. Scrutiny of signatures to determine if ballots are legitimate must decline. And “ballot harvesting,” which allows third parties and outside groups to collect voters’ ballots and deliver them to polling places, must be legalized and expanded.

The fact that parts of Biden’s base had pushed for him to pick Representative Barbara Lee of California as his running mate had helped the Trump team with its messaging, since Lee was known for her ties to far-left groups and being openly pro-socialism.

Two of the most accurate polling firms, Trafalgar and Susquehanna, predicted something far different: a too-close-to-call nail-biter of a race with Biden up by only one to three points. Despite being far more accurate, those two polling firms were regularly criticized by others in the polling industry for having a right-wing bias.

Polls with as much as seventeen-point predicted victories for Biden shaped news coverage for months and hurt morale in the Trump team. Even if they’d learned better than most to not believe polls or other media narratives, the bad headlines were difficult to ignore.

“Polls are one of the most dishonest things,” President Trump said, reflecting on the matter later from his Mar-a-Lago home. “I have never seen dishonesty like this. They’re dishonest with polls. You know it’s suppression to keep people home. Do you know how many people didn’t vote because of that poll and Wisconsin? And probably other places too, that poll got so much publicity.”

At least one pollster agrees with Trump. After the 2020 election, pollster Jim Lee of Susquehanna Polling & Research blasted the politicization of his industry and issued a statement noting that a slew of inaccurate polling results that almost universally overstated Biden’s support lef...

Arizona state law permits mail-in votes to be counted up to two weeks prior to Election Day. Those votes, which leaned Democratic, were some of the first to be posted when the polls closed. The state has a reputation for counting accurately and running elections cleanly, but it’s inordinately slow. It took the counters in Arizona days to count their ballots, which meant that the Election Day results that were posted were largely based on absentee ballots.

Months later, Time magazine would run its now infamous article bragging about how it had been done. Without irony or shame, the magazine reported that “[t]here was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes” creating “an extraordinary shadow effort” by a “well-funded cabal of powerful people” to oppose Trump.112 Corporate CEOs, organized labor, left-wing activists, and Democrats all worked together in secret to secure a Biden victory. For Trump, these groups represented a powerful Washington and Democratic establishment that saw an unremarkable career politician like Biden as merely a vessel for protecting their self-interests. Accordingly, when Trump was asked whom he blames for the rigging of the 2020 election, he quickly responded, “Least of all Biden.” Time would, of course, disingenuously frame this effort as an attempt to “oppose Trump’s assault on democracy,” even as Time reporter Molly Ball noted this shadow campaign “touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding.” The funding enabled the country’s sudden rush to mail-in balloting, which Ball described as “a revolution in how people vote.”113 The funding from Democratic donors to public election administrators was revolutionary. The Democrats’ network of nonprofit activist groups embedded into the nation’s electoral structure through generous grants from Democratic donors. They helped accomplish the Democrat...

His dogged investigation, however, led to the finding that the dossier, far from being reliable intelligence for which the FBI could vouch, was secretly funded by Clinton and the Democratic National Committee.

A Quinnipiac poll in December 2017 showed that 86 percent of Democratic voters believed “the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to influence the 2016 presidential election.”

Remarkably, only Republicans applauded. The refusal of Democrats to applaud the lowest poverty rate for black Americans shocked observers, a sign of the deep-seated hatred that had marked their approach to the entire administration. Several of Trump’s most vociferous critics refused even to show up.25

The pro-life movement pledged its support, however reluctantly. In return it got a leader who put up a better fight during debates against abortion than any other presidential nominee in history. In the final debate against Hillary Clinton, Trump left her struggling to respond when he said of her opposition to any restriction on abortion, “Well, I think it’s terrible. If you go with what Hillary is saying, in the ninth month, you can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb of the mother just prior to the birth of the baby.”33

Trump continued, “Now, you can say that that’s OK and Hillary can say that that’s OK. But it’s not OK with me, because based on what she’s saying, and based on where she’s going, and where she’s been, you can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month on the final day. And that’s not acceptable.”34 As improbable as it had once seemed, by the 2020 State of the Union address Trump had proven himself to be a thoroughly pro-life president. He had taken swift and decisive action to limit access to abortion, preventing tax dollars from funding abortions overseas and allowing states to cut federal funds to Planned Parenthood.

Immediately after it ended, Pelosi’s anger and frustration boiled over. She stood up and began tearing the pages of his speech in half, the first time a Speaker of the House had so visibly violated norms of respect toward the president.

As Rahm Emanuel, former Chicago mayor and chief of staff to President Barack Obama, famously said, “Never let a crisis go to waste.”8 When the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, Democrats immediately recognized that it would give them a once-in-a-generation opportunity to radically alter America’s voting laws and procedures to benefit their party.

But the “relief” plaintiffs sought in many of these cases were changes to election policy that the Democratic Party had wanted for years, such as the expansion of mail-in voting and the relaxation or removal of scrutiny of mail-in ballots.

Democrats had figured out how to get what they wanted from existing rules. The only thing that could have been better was if they could import their “intense digital outreach and a well-coordinated vote-by-mail operation” into the official government election offices in heavily Democratic areas.52 As will be explained in subsequent chapters, grants from liberal billionaires allowed them to do just that in five cities in Wisconsin, Democrat-heavy counties in Georgia, and overwhelmingly Democratic Philadelphia, among others. Democrats would essentially run their vote-by-mail operation through official government offices, and Republicans wouldn’t find out until months after the election had passed.

A Politico article in November 2020 claimed that Biden’s eventual win in Georgia was related to Democrats’ massive efforts to fight so-called “voter suppression tactics,” the left’s terminology for ensuring that election fraud is limited by removing ineligible voters from polling books, having voters submit identification, and limiting the participation of outside parties in the secret voting process.56 Democrats did invest in the project, spending tens of millions of dollars to challenge and change voter integrity laws.

“If America were a house, they’d be the termites. It’s that bad,” said Georgia Republican and voter database expert Mark Davis about the lawfare engaged in fighting against voting integrity laws. Long before COVID-19, the Democratic Party of Georgia, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sued Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger in November 2019 to get him to water down the state’s requirements for checking signatures on mail-in ballots.57 Governor Kemp, under pressure from Democratic groups alleging voter suppression, had already signed a law earlier in 2019 that relaxed signature requirements and made it more difficult to reject ballots for signature mismatch or other ballot problems. Elias, who was leading the lawsuits, wanted the requirements relaxed even more.58

What’s more, many counties used minimum-wage temporary workers to sort through ballots, not skilled analysts of what constitutes a signature match.

Raffensperger also requested and received a $5,591,800 grant from the privately funded Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), a group funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan.84 The group reported Georgia used the funds to push mail-in balloting and to counteract negative messaging about mail-in voting.

CEIR reported that it contacted all fifty states and invited them to apply for grants to help push mail-in voting. Twenty-three applied for and received money. In a report after the election, CEIR tried to downplay its work helping Democrats, saying “there was a fairly even partisan and geographic balance” in the awards. It noted that eleven of the states that received funds had voted for Trump in 2016, while twelve voted for Hillary Clinton.